Julie
Wilfert spotted the debris as she drove through the intersection of Rural
and Carver roads last Friday morning, and it made her feel ill.Then she saw the people gathered around a wrecked minivan.

Wilfert was on her way to C.I. Waggoner
Elementary School, where she planned to volunteer in her child’s classroom
for the morning.

Before going to class, however, she
began making telephone calls to Tempe City Hall to plead for action on what
Wilfert believes is a deceptively dangerous intersection.

“I was taking my kids to school. There
had just been an accident there (at Rural and Carver roads) about a week ago
that shut down the intersection. We had come into the intersection and I saw
the debris . . . I noticed people on the corner. I glanced backward and saw
two or three people standing at the minivan,” Wilfert recalls.

“When I got to school, I said
‘That’s it, let’s start calling everybody we know.’ ”

Wilfert did not learn until later in the
day Friday that the early-morning accident claimed the life of a local
woman, 34-year-old Iesha Alston, who died when her minivan was broadsided on
the driver’s side by a preschool van whose driver reportedly ran the
stoplight on Rural Road.

Tempe Police spokesman Sgt. Dan Masters
said investigators uncovered no evidence of excessive speed or weather
problems or that the preschool van’s driver, 20-year-old Holly Tennant,
was impaired, he said.

“Everything points to a red-light
violation.”

Wilfert, who lives within a half mile of
the Rural-Carver intersection, said there are too many crashes caused by
drivers on Rural Road “blowing through red lights” at Carver Road.

A close friend was lucky to survive when
she, too, was broadsided in a minivan on Rural Road on the day after
Christmas, Wilfert said.

Her theory is that drivers on Rural Road
tend to be irritated by the red lights at Carver, which is by no means a
major cross street. “They try to push it” and accelerate through the
intersection instead of stopping, she said.

“You can see it in the drivers’
eyes. You can tell they think they can make it.”

“We just need to find a way to control
the cars going through the intersection somehow. It needs to be done now,”
Wilfert said.

She noted that both Waggoner Elementary
and Kyrene Middle School are within a quarter mile of the intersection. Many
parents who drive their children to those schools use the intersection and
many schoolchildren must cross Rural Road at Carver daily, she said.

“I can’t even imagine the kids that
are crossing that intersection,” she said. “Let's face it, in rush hour
traffic 45 mph means 50-55 mph to most, and the image of 50 mph cars flying
past our children just doesn't say ‘school crossing’ to me,” she wrote
in an email to Tempe officials.

“This is a call to action to quickly
assess and make immediate changes to the intersection at Carver Rd. and
Rural,” Wilfert wrote in her email to the city.

“My neighborhood lies west of Rural
and feeds into KMS and Waggoner on the east side. We currently have six
lanes of traffic blowing through red lights at the light at Carver. This has
been going on for months, and records show the number of accidents,
including the latest fatality of a mother taking kids to KMS.”

“Many mothers I know in our
neighborhood have their own stories of accidents and near misses and would
be happy to email their comments, if necessary. Would a mass emailing of
comments help speed this up?”

City
officials have been responsive to her concerns, Wilfert said. On Tuesday,
several motorcycle officers watched over the intersection, she reported.

“Our public works department is
working on this issue with a great deal of urgency,” City Manager Will
Manley told Wilfert in an email.

Wilfert said she would like the city to
install a red-light camera at the intersection to catch violators.“But it is very unlikely.They
are very expansive and Tempe currently has only two – at Broadway and
Southern and Broadway and Rural.”

She also
has suggested the city consider:

Parking a photo radar van near the
intersection

Reducing the overall speed limit on
Rural

Reducing the speed limit to 35 miles per
hour in that area for a school crossing area

Having flashing yellow lights prior to
the intersection on both sides delineating the crossing area

Placing signs that show the upcoming
children/school crossing area

Placing signs that say it is a no red
light running intersection “whether we have the camera or not”

Checking landscaping and block walls for
blocked view from the west and east sides of Carver

Painting SLOW in neon colors on the
streets before the intersection

Tempe police and traffic engineers are
looking at the intersection, according to Shelly Seyler, a senior traffic
engineer.

So far, city traffic engineers have
found nothing unusual about the Rural-Carver intersection that would make it
especially dangerous, she said, stressing that the investigation is only in
its preliminary stages.

“From a preliminary analysis, we are
not seeing anything that stands out,” Seyler said.“But we will be taking into account that the street (Carver) does
lead to a school.”

City records indicate that
“approximately 23,000 vehicles on an average day might go through that
intersection,” Seyler said.

Accident reports show 12 accidents at
Rural and Carver in the past five years, she said.The city traffic engineering office still is trying to determine how
many of those accidents involved red-light violations, but none of the 12
accidents on record involved pedestrians or bicyclists, she said.

The signal timing at Rural and Carver
roads is typical of how stoplights are timed throughout the city where
smaller “collector” streets like Carver cross major “arterial”
streets like Rural, she said.There
is a 1.5 second delay between the time traffic on Rural Road is stopped by a
red light and the time traffic on Carver gets the green light, she said.

Wilfert said she waits even longer
before entering Rural Road from Carver these days. “I almost stop to look
to see (if anyone is running the red light on Rural Road).Certainly, if you’re sitting at a red light, you’ve got to wait
five seconds to see if it’s clear to go through.”